Barry Humphries kicks off Dame Edna's slingbacks after UK tour

CAN it be true that Dame Edna is genuinely retiring? Apparently after this current tour - she opens at the London Palladium this week - that's it. No more live appearances. No more "hello possums!" No more flying gladioli.

What will we miss most? Perhaps it is the moment in every show when, the spotlight glinting off her huge butterfly specs, Edna wanders downstage and peers distastefully into the stalls and selects her victim.

"What's your name, darling?" innocently asks this purple-rinsed she-lizard in search of fresh meat. The collective sigh of relief of the audience who have not been picked on is palpable. An invitation up on to the stage invariably means humiliation. Edna always exudes fake pity for the ordinariness of her fans, milking to the last drop what she calls "her priceless gift of being able to laugh at the misfortunes of others".

For some Edna is a bitchy drag act whose shtick is long past it. But for those of us who remain loyal, Barry Humphries is an actor and celebrity satirist of chameleon brilliance.

Even in old age he still outperforms the young comedians who dominate today's television. But Humphries (Edna refers to him as her manager or "that failed comedian") is approaching 80 and reckons it's time to kick off the slingbacks while he and she can still walk.

The woman who has risen from suburban housewife to become a "global gigastar" has dominated Humphries's life for the best part of six decades. Indeed their two personalities have fused together to the point where recently on The One Show Barry found himself thinking: "I wish I'd said that," at some witticism of Edna's.

The woman first emerged from his fertile imagination in Australia in 1955, a diversion while he was on tour in Shakespeare. According to her book My Gorgeous Life, she was born in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales and lost her first baby, Lois, to a "rogue koala". This was as Melbourne prepared to host the 1956 Olympics.

In those days she was plain Mrs Norm Everage, a rather drab creature in an apron and polyester dress. Back then the joke was on her, not us. Edna was loosely based on Barry's own mother Louisa, the daughter of a Manchester immigrant whose life consisted of "hats and glads" social functions in the backwater where the Humphries family lived.

Mrs Humphries was a complex creature: interesting, overbearing and possessed of a sardonic sense of humour. No wonder then that Dame Edna is so merciless about her own upbringing: "My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia." Edna is today almost the last survivor of the stage creations who emerged from the stupefying dullness of Moonee Ponds, the Melbourne suburb Barry couldn't wait to escape.

Perhaps it is the moment in every show when, the spotlight glinting off her huge butterfly specs, Edna wanders downstage and peers distastefully into the stalls and selects her victim

Acting and performance art were his way out. The story of how Barry once exhibited a pair of wellingtons filled with custard and called the exhibit "Pus In Boots" is well known. Less often told is how he once took a bus ride in Melbourne. Every time the bus stopped waiters got on and served him a different course of a lavish silver service dinner. The entire performance was arranged for the benefit of a few open-mouthed commuters.

It was comedian Peter Cook who "discovered" Edna in England.

Barry was new to Britain and making his way as a struggling performer, playing the undertaker in the musical Oliver! while Cook was in the revue Beyond The Fringe at the next door theatre. He gave Barry and his characters a slot at his nightclub. Barry flopped. The entire audience left except theatre critic and future quizmaster Bamber Gascoigne, who wrote that Humphries's act was "soporific". Edna confused the word with "syphilitic" and took great offence.

The chief reason to see Edna live today is to get a glimpse of the other Humphries creations she has long since overshadowed and who are retiring with her. Fans may remember the macho Aussie creation Barry Mackenzie who started life as a cartoon character in Private Eye, written by Humphries. He has long since vanished but his relative, the deeply vulgar Sir Les Patterson, hasn't. You'll find amateur celebrity chef Sir Les - with a nasty bout of gastro-enteritis - cooking rissoles in the new show.

Sir Les famously wears what looks like a police truncheon down his left trouser leg, quaffs chardonnay, belches profusely and has huge, horrible teeth.

This glorious, boorish, sexist, drunken Australian cultural attache (a PR disaster for his homeland) is the most adult-rated member of Humphries's gallery of characters. Still surviving too is Sandy Stone, an old gent based on a Melbourne neighbour whose hugely boring reminiscences Barry was inspired to recreate.

Sandy Stone is a ghost in a dressing gown reflecting on times past in a weak, sibilant voice thanks to an ill-fitting denture. The mood in his amazing monologues is one of nostalgia and twilight sadness. Clive James - a fellow Australian who arrived from Down Under at the same time as Barry - still regards Sandy as his greatest creation.

Very few great comedians escape the bottle or divorce. Barry Humphries, a former alcoholic, has been married four times (the first two wives were dancers). Since 1990 he has been married to Lizzie Spender, daughter of poet Sir Stephen Spender. At their Hampstead home in north London he has a library of 20,000 books. He is an avid collector of paintings and Victorian art and ephemera. He even owns playwright Oscar Wilde's address book. The world's gaudiest woman has paid for the lot. Edna is a gift that goes on giving.

Until now.

WHAT is Edna's greatest cultural legacy? Arguably it's her effect on the TV interview. In the old days the likes of Michael Parkinson and Michael Aspel were essentially straight-men for the rehearsed anecdotes of their guests. Today's cheeky-chappie hosts such as Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross owe a huge debt to An Audience With Dame Edna in the Eighties which stood the format on its head. Edna was the star, not her guests. Madge Allsop - played by the marvellous Emily Perry who died in 2008 at the age of 100 - was her abused and unsmiling sidekick. Fans regard these shows as Edna's very best work.

But Dame Edna is still capable of disruption.

Recently she was on Piers Morgan's CNN show discussing the royal baby. She slyly mocked Morgan, his show and his American audience. She also raised the question of royal sex. When asked what present she had given William and Kate she said it was a George Foreman grill.

And why? "There's going to be some exertion on the honeymoon.

They might need a snack in the middle of the night." Who else could get away with that without causing offence? Say what you like about Dame Edna, behind the specs and beneath the "wisteria hue" meringue hair there is an extraordinary comic anarchist looking forward to not shaving his legs.